The present invention relates to a color copier, color printer or similar color image forming apparatus, and a cleaning device for cleaning an image carrier included in the image forming apparatus.
It is a common practice with a color image forming apparatus to form toner images of different colors on a photoconductive element by an electrophotographic procedure, and sequentially transfer them to a paper or similar recording medium one above the other, thereby completing a multicolor or full-color image. In this type of apparatus, every time a toner image of any color is transferred from the drum to the paper, a cleaning device cleans the surface of the drum to prepare it for the next toner image.
There has been proposed a cleaning device constructed to recycle the toners collected from the drum to a developing device. This kind of implementation elaborated to reduce the running cost of the image forming apparatus. However, the conventional cleaning device with such a capability is provided with only one cleaning unit. This brings about a problem that the toners of different colors removed from the drum are collected in the same cleaning unit and, therefore, mixed together. The collected toners, therefore, cannot be recycled or reused. To collect the toners of different colors individually, a plurality of cleaning units each being assigned to a particular toner may be arranged around the drum. This, however, requires a substantial space around the drum. The multiple cleaning unit scheme would, therefore, increase the overall size of the image forming apparatus and obstruct the free layout of process units around the drum.